The emergence of the World Wide Web has provided terrorists with an inexpensive, ubiquitous, and anonymous means for acquiring information and exercising command and control over their operations. For example, Mohamed Atta, the operational leader of the 9/11 attack, researched U.S. flight schools via the Internet from Hamburg, Germany. Targets of intelligence collection have become more sophisticated, thus rendering surveillance and accurate threat assessments more difficult.
Despite the problems that the Internet and other information and communication technologies create, they can also be a part of the solution to these problems. However, such technologies produce best results when an organization has the doctrine, structure, and incentives to exploit those technologies. For example, as long as intelligence agencies' personnel and security systems continue to incentivize information withholding instead of information sharing, even the best information technology would not significantly boost information sharing. Furthermore, the sheer volume of information on the Internet would require individual analysts to spend an inordinate amount of time researching and searching for pertinent data.
In addition, with information portals and portlets on classified systems like Intelink and Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet), analysts have to spend more time seeking and collecting information than actually analyzing the information. The exponential growth in the volume of information means that analysts would have to spend a disproportionate and possibly redundant amount of time and effort searching for pertinent data or critical threads of information. Therefore, analysts throughout the intelligence community, e.g., the Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) Laboratory of the Defense Intelligence Agency, are faced with an unenviable task of having to gather massive amounts of data from diverse sources and organize this data in a format to conduct and expedite intelligence gathering. In the past and at present time, to manage the massive amount of data, the intelligence community has devoted tremendously powerful but also hugely expensive computing resources, e.g., arrays of supercomputers, to attack this problem with a “brute strength” approach.